At the same time, there is some worth in attempting to assess the nominees by the standards and objectives determined by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, particularly in terms of its recent changes and revisions. Over the past decade, the Academy has set itself a number of targets that fuelled internal reform and reinvention. Each year, the nominees provide a stick against which the success of these initiatives might best be assessed, to determine whether certain key changes in process have shifted the outcome in the desired direction.
The past ten years have found the Academy grappling with a crisis of identity and relevance, with the Board of Governors working hard to retool the behemoth organisation to create something sturdier. Over the past ten years, the Academy has committed to a number of programmes and initiatives designed to change the direction and aesthetic of their annual awards.
The stakes are phenomenally high. Even beyond the cultural cachet afforded to the Academy Awards, there are more practical concerns. It is estimated that almost ninety percent of the Academy’s internal revenue is generated from the sale of advertising space during the Academy Awards. In 2013, for example, the Oscars generated $89.6m of the Academy’s $103.2m total income. This money pays for everything that the Academy does during the year, from providing services to members to maintaining its archives and history.
The past ten years have been spent trying to build a more robust cultural institution.
There is a sense of familiarity to Oscar season, with familiar rhythms and tempos to the race. Just as the middle of the movie-going calendar has come to be dominated by blockbuster fare, the cinematic year is bridged by the inevitability of awards season. Just as the summer movie season stretches backwards into April and March with the release of tentpoles like 300 or Alice in Wonderland or Beauty and the Beast, the next awards season seems to have begun before the last one is even properly finished.
As the Oscar nominees are announced in late January, the Sundance Film Festival is winding down in Park City. As this year’s crop of Oscar nominees settle into the final stage of their journey, next year’s candidates are jockeying for position. Sundance has been the launching pad for a number of Oscar success stories in recent years; Little Miss Sunshine, Winter’s Bone, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Whiplash, Get Out. This is to say nothing of the films that originated at Sundance and enjoyed more modest awards success; Mudbound and The Big Sick are two examples from this year. Nor does it acknowledge those features that dominated early speculation before imploding in the awards press cycle; The Birth of a Nation is perhaps the most obvious recent example.
From Sundance onwards, the festival circuit keeps awards speculation going strong. This speculation is fuelled by the existence of websites whose primary purpose is to report upon the state of the race, in an internet age of constant churn and instant controversy. These are the prestige equivalent of fan sites producing listicles and speculation about the latest reboot, remake or sequel. It is customary to see articles predicting the following year’s awards frontrunners peppered through the summer season, when there is very little change in the dynamics to justify such coverage. This cycle has a numbing effect on audiences, even before the season kicks into high gear each November through March.
24 CinÉireann / February 2018